Anxiety in Parents and Children
Over the past month, I have written two articles with a focus on anxiety. I have experienced anxiety from a young age. I have also noticed it in my children. And I have some observations about how it starts, how we pass it down, and how it manifests.
PsychCentral: The Anxious Cycle: How Children Inherit Our Anxiety
The Huffington Post: Anxiety in Children: Don’t Look the Other Way
To All Those Parts Who May Be Concerned:
I Am Glad To Have Met You
Over the past 6 years, I have been blessed to meet you and learn from you. While I didn’t know about you for many years, I have learned that you are those parts of me that separated during my traumatic childhood. While you used to sabotage my every move and infiltrate my fleeting peaceful moments, we have a different relationship now, a much healthier relationship.
This healing spiral we have been traveling has brought us through some rough memories and emotions. You have been brave in your willingness to share information, express deep emotional pain, and help me question the world around me. While you have been highly motivated to let go of your pain, you have been less motivated to trust, and that makes sense. But you keep considering the possibilities that I bring to you and for that, I am grateful.
That One Thing
There is one stopping point on this healing spiral that brings the most pain, the most resistance. While letting go of the betrayals by friends, the years of trafficking and the sex abuse has been possible, you still can’t let go of the parents. It isn’t that you can’t let go of those particular parents. You just can’t let go of the idea that you deserve parents, real parents, unconditionally loving parents. read more…
I Reject The Scarcity Lie
I Am Enough. There Is Enough.
Survivors of abuse often live a life plagued with scarcity. We were taught at a young age that we weren’t enough, there wasn’t enough and life would not provide enough for us in the future. When we suffer financial abuse or trafficking, things are often worse. We can believe we have a finite worth, we are a commodity, and we have already expended that worth. All these beliefs leave very little hope for an abundant future.
My relationship with money has been a struggle for my entire life. And while I always made enough to survive when I worked in the corporate world, I have come face-to-face with my monetary dysfunction as I have started working for myself. And I think that is the point. If it was easy to chart new territory, everyone would do it, but the lack of stability, the self-doubt and the intense commitment required make it scary on the good days. I have spent some time identifying the beliefs that hold me back lately. There are many. And I get the impression I am not the only one who struggles with these.
1) If I charge for my services, it won’t be worth it. I have always struggled with impostor’s syndrome. In a family trying to appear like something they are not, it goes without saying. I know I am helping people. I know I am making a difference. I hear from my clients that I am providing them safety and a new perspective. But I still hear that voice. The voice deep inside of me that says, “Are you crazy? You are just an abused little girl. What could you possibly have to offer anyone else? Stop pretending and go back to your hiding place.” And while the inner voice comes up less and less, I still hear it. And every once in a while, it tricks me for a second. read more…
Saying Yes to Life
While trauma recovery seems like a chaotic experience, I have noticed in hindsight the surprising structure it seems to follow. My memory recovery follows themes. While I do address themes multiple times, it is at progressively deeper levels, as if I am traveling a spiral. I have also noticed how my external and internal world mirror each other, and it gets much more intense as I come closer to a new realization or belief change. I have also noticed that the inner parts get older and more defended as I work through recovery. It isn’t that my memories follow a linear age, but the beliefs become more sophisticated and complicated over time. There seems to be an understanding that I need practice. And I continually progress toward more challenging recovery experiences. Now, I am not suggesting it works this way for everyone. I am suggesting that my higher self is particularly organized, which may explain why organization is my defense mechanism of choice.
But recently, I have noticed another pattern. And it does seem to be a bit more universal, as other survivors are telling me the same. When I started recovery, I was focused on setting boundaries. And I practiced and practiced. I wasn’t intentionally clearing people out of my life, but when I said no, the people who had been in my life didn’t like it at all. So they left. I also realized that certain situations and life circumstances were not working either. I started to leave some things behind. I came to a place where I could say no well.
But as I have been working with my inner teenager lately, I have been faced with my resistance to life. It seems that I have been avoiding the yes part of life. I have also noticed that saying yes to life is substantially harder than saying no. And there are a couple of reasons for that. read more…
10 Life Lessons from the World of Harry Potter
In my family, we like a lot of things. My children have a ton of passion and energy, so there is always room to explore something new. We like board games. We like Pokemon. We like Disney. We like karate, gymnastics and swimming. But nothing, I repeat nothing, beats Harry Potter in our house. The twins are convinced that their Hogwarts letters will be coming on their 11th birthday (and I am afraid that day may be fairly disappointing in the scheme of things).
I wasn’t a huge fan until a year ago when I started reading the books to my children. I had seen all the movies during the initial craze, but I wasn’t an avid reader at that point. I thought the movies were pretty good, but I had seen better, so I never got caught up in it. Then I opened the first book and read the first chapter to my kids, and the rest, as they say, is history. We read the first two books together in a very short time. Immediately after, I started reading the third book. After I read it, I decided it was appropriate for my eight-year-olds, so I read it to them. I read a book twice, back-to-back, and was not bored of it for a second. And of course, I continued reading the other books and did not stop until I had read every word. I was hooked.
Since that time, my kids and I will watch the first three movies and discuss Harry Potter whenever the opportunity arises. I try not to blow the plot for them, but their friends at school do it anyway. While not everything will be a surprise, I am sure they will love the rest of the books when they read them in the years to come.
In many families, it stops there. But being the cognitive, meaning-seeking individual that I am, I could not help but find lessons in these stories, lessons that I have used in my daily parenting. Kids love stories. Kids listen and relate to stories. And since I am always looking for ways to get through to my kids, I use stories. I don’t know if J.K. Rowling was attempting to pass these gems along, but I use them anyway. Here is my list of life lessons from the Harry Potter series: read more…
It Doesn’t Make a Difference
Existential Questions
Have you ever noticed that the most difficult emotion to express is the emotion that is most opposite to your strength? I have a willful personality. Giving up is not a part of who I am. If it was, I probably would not be here today. So when the feeling of futility hits me, it knocks me down, leaving me paralyzed, unable to reconcile between that old victim self and my pure version of self.
That victim self loves to steer my mind in an existential direction. Why am I here? This isn’t different than most people. I think we all wonder why we are here. The existential debate will live on as long as there are people roaming the Earth. That being said, I think the confusion runs a little deeper when we have a childhood of trauma. It can lead to some pretty extreme interpretations. My father, who undoubtedly had a lifetime of trauma, was a staunch atheist. There is nothing wrong with that. But I remember thinking, “He better hope there isn’t a God. Otherwise, he’s in trouble.”
While my questions can run deep, I also wonder about everyday life. Why do I continue to run on this hamster wheel of life? Why do I repeat the same thing every day in my own personal version of the Groundhog Day movie? Why am I making so many attempts to live a better life? Is it working? But more importantly, why bother? Am I really making any difference at all? What is the point in going bowling? What is the point in cleaning the bathroom? What is the point in waking up every morning and pushing forward? What is the point in writing one more article about trauma? What is the point in answering one more email? read more…
Dear Inner Teenager
Dear Inner Teenager,
You haven’t had an easy life. You have interacted with a lot of power-hungry people. And I’m not just talking about the pedophiles and their enablers. There were adults who wanted you to be less than you were. There were other teenagers who wanted to make you feel less smart, less attractive, less talented. They needed you to be small because they wanted to build themselves up in comparison. They let you know you were not acceptable. You had too much to say for a girl. You acted too smart for a kid. You should shut up and listen to your elders.
But in reality, the courage you were showing to remain confident and expressive after all that abuse was phenomenal. And I’m proud of you. I am proud that you didn’t shut down. I am proud that you continued to stand up for yourself. I am proud of your resiliency. You didn’t let them break you.
I am proud that you will allow me to take risks, speak up, and help others without sabotaging my every move. I know you would much rather find a cabin in the woods somewhere off-grid. I know you don’t like the public part of this work. But I know you see the gift you were born with, the gift of expression. It is why you never stopped standing up for yourself all those years ago. So, you begrudgingly allow me to take risks when you would prefer safety. And one day, I know we will do it together. And for that, I am proud of you. read more…
3 Steps to End Self-Sabotage
When I started to embrace spirituality in my life, the first thing I noticed was how many options were available. I loved the idea of mindfulness. I worked to hone my self-awareness and it made a huge difference in my life. But there were some popular concepts that were not working for me.
When I started my recovery work, setting intentions was the latest spiritual direction. I set my intentions. I did my meditations. I made my vision boards. I wrote my mantras. I did my best to embrace the process. But honestly, it seemed to go nowhere.
As I ventured deeper in to my own recovery work, I found the reason. My traumatic past had separated aspects of my being and these inner parts were no longer accessible to my ego self, the part that sets intentions. As a matter of a fact, the parts of me that I had cut off were not on board with my intentions. More to the point, they were vehemently opposed to my intentions. And without the whole self behind an intention, it will never happen … EVER. I discovered that doing cognitive work with my conscious ego self was essentially putting lipstick on a pig. read more…
Just Me?
Do you ever have one of those months
when you have to move houses as a single parent,
and it seems like it is too much to handle on your own,
and you are trying to start a new business,
and you have very little money,
and the kids are home from school for the summer and don’t have enough to do,
and the move leaves you dissociated and struggling with insomnia because everything is new,
and that makes it harder to focus when you do have time to work,
and the kids are constantly fighting because they are stressed too, read more…
Holding On, Letting Go & Breaking Open
The Re-creation of Abandonment
One of the first things I learned in recovery was the inevitable re-creation of our most significant childhood hurts. I thought there would be comfort in that understanding because I loved having an explanation for what otherwise appeared random. I have always wanted predictability and this understanding helped make sense out of an otherwise chaotic life. But there was a problem. I had repressed memories. And it was those memories that held the secret to my deepest pain.
For the first several years of memory recovery, I did not understand the manifestations of my outer life. I was confused. Why did my adult life seem to be riddled with abandonment when I did not experience abandonment in my childhood? I would have given anything to have been abandoned by my caregivers, especially my father. Yet he stuck around, continuing to abuse me. It didn’t make sense that I seemed terrified of abandonment which became a self-fulfilling prophecy over and over. It didn’t make sense until that one memory, the memory that changed everything.
I have previously written about a person who was supposed to save me from my life of abuse. He was older than me. I had confided in him about the abuse. And I was sure he would help me. I was sure he was my ticket out of the hell I was living. We spent one summer together, an unlikely friendship between a gay college student and a traumatized kid. I would run away from home so I could sleep on his floor because for one night, I could feel safe. He would take me home knowing that my parents had the potential to ruin him, out him, make his life a living hell. He knew this because of the threats. He was in a bad situation. As a child, I didn’t understand that. I just thought I found someone who cared. And I needed that more than anything. read more…
